education reform in the nation's capital

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Month: September 2017

In light of the recent discovery that Georgetown University sold 272 slaves in order to pay off debts, this past summer six Gonzaga College High School students wanted to know if their institution had any ties to the dark history of slavery. The connection was plausible because, as the Washington Post’s Rachel Siegel explained in an article yesterday, before it became Gonzaga, the institution was called the Washington Seminary, which was a annex of Georgetown.

So sixteen and seventeen year olds Jack Boland, Daniel Podratsky, Jack Brown, Hameed Nelson, Joe Boland, and Matthew Johnson, under the supervision of history teacher Ed Donnellan, for a couple of weeks combed Georgetown University’s Booth Family Center for Special Collections. Their work was spurred by a November 2016 lecture that took place at Gonzaga by Adam Rothman, a Georgetown history professor and the principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive. Following the talk, Mr. Donnellan asked if pupils wanted to volunteer to investigate the school’s past. Ms. Siegel details what they discovered:

“That earlier research showed how Georgetown had profited from Jesuit-owned plantations that thrived across the region. What about our school, the Gonzaga students wondered. Did it, too, benefit from, and help sustain, the global slave trade of the 19th century?

They found their answers: Profit from those plantations was funneled to Washington Seminary, which at the time was part of Georgetown. And two slaves — Gabriel and another named Isaih — worked at the school for an unknown period of time.”

The students became fascinated by multiple references to Gabriel. The Post continues the story:

“Multiple mentions of Gabriel being tipped small amounts appear in records kept by the seminary. And there’s a reference in a Georgetown accounts ledger that describes him as ‘a black boy from the Seminary of Washington.’

How Gabriel got to Georgetown isn’t entirely clear, though the students suspect he was brought by a family and used as counterbalance to get $1 off tuition per month. One document suggests he took the place of another slave in 1827.

Another document from a Georgetown accounts ledger notes ‘Gabe’ was sold for $450 to an unknown buyer, with a 5 percent commission going to an Edward Millard, who once attended the Washington Seminary.”

Gonzaga separated from Georgetown in 1858. The school’s website states that as “the oldest all-boys school in Washington, DC, Gonzaga has a rich legacy that stretches back nearly 200 years. Over the course of that history, Gonzaga has demonstrated and reaffirmed a deep commitment to Jesuit education. And it has chosen to do so in the heart of the inner city—on a street shared with leaders of business and government, and on a block where it ministers to the least fortunate in society.” The school accepts some students through Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, the school voucher plan in the District that offers tuition to private schools.

Hameed Nelson, one of the students doing the research, wonders what they can do now that they have the information about Gabriel. Mr. Donnellan says he is thinking about building a memorial garden.

On Saturday the Washington Post’s Michael Alison Chandler revealed that a civil lawsuit by the D.C. Attorney General against the leaders of Options PCS has been settled. As a reminder, towards the end of 2013, the U.S. Attorney accused Donna Montgomery, David Cranford and Paul Dalton, managers of Options, of stealing $3 million dollars in public funds belonging to the charter through a private company that they had established to provide school services. Others caught up in this mess included long time WUSA Channel 9 newscaster J.C. Hayward, who was Options board chair when a contractual arrangement was struck between the school and the former managers, and who was allegedly paid to attend board meetings, and Jeremy Williams, a hero to those of us involved in D.C.’s charter movement until it was discovered that he was hiding the Options financial scheme through his position as the chief financial officer of the DC Public Charter School Board. When this news broke Ms. Hayward was placed on leave by the station and she eventually retired.

Options was established to teach severely emotionally and physically disabled students that no other schools were equipped to serve.

Last summer the U.S. Attorney ended a criminal investigation against the same individuals. Ms. Hayward had been dismissed from the case earlier. The civil action had been on hold while the criminal complaint was progressing.

Under the civil settlement, Ms. Chander indicates, Ms. Montgomery, Mr. Cranford, and Mr. Dalton will together have to pay $575,000 to Kingsman Academy PCS, the charter that replaced Options in August 2015. Mr. Williams is being charged $84,237 in an agreement reached the week before. The Post reporter also states that “the defendants agreed that they would not serve in a leadership role of any nonprofit corporation in the District until October 2020.”

The article includes the additional information that Kent Amos, the founder of Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS, also settled a civil lawsuit with the city in 2015 after it was found that he was skimming over a million dollars a year from his institution for himself and family members. The charter was shuttered the same year by the PCSB.

There was some good that came out of the Options disaster. My friend Shannon Dodge took over Kingsman Academy PCS and she and her team are doing thoroughly impressive work. I interviewed Ms. Dodge last May. In addition, Josh Kern, through his role at Ten Square Consulting, demonstrated for all to see as the court-appointed Options Receiver how to superiorly manage a school turnaround.

Fight for Children, known for sponsoring the annual fundraiser Fight Night, is trying something new and innovative in an effort to focus attention on the importance of early childhood education. Fight for Children Week is being held Monday, September 25th through Friday, September 29th and includes activities for community members, educators, business leaders, and policy makers.

Let’s start with ways that the community can show support for Fight for Children’s mission “to ensure that all kids in Washington, D.C., especially those in the highest need areas, receive a quality early education and a solid foundation for future success.” There are promotions at multiple area restaurants where a portion of proceeds will go to support Fight for Children:

Month of September: $1 from the sale of each slice of the Pie of the Month from Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Seafood,

Week of September 24th to 30th: Proceeds from the sale of all of D.C.’s Taylor Gourmet’s Cookies for Children,

Monday, September 25th: 10% of sales from Cava at Dupont Circle during the hours of 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. when you mention Fight for Children at check-out,

Wednesday, September 27th: &pizza will donate $2 from the sale of every pizza from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Chinatown, Dupont Circle, and Columbia Heights locations but the digital flyer must be shown at checkout, and

Thursday, September 28th: 20% of sales from the Roti Modern Mediterranean at 1629 K Street from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. but the digital flyer must be shown at checkout.

Follow Fight for Children on Facebook and Twitter to obtain the digital flyers.

Events for educators, business leaders, and policy makers include:

Tuesday, September 26: Coffee, Conversation, and Controversy is an invitation-only breakfast series that will bring people together to discuss important topics around early education. The goal of the discussion “is to identify concrete actions that can be taken by key members of the community to further improve the educational experiences and outcomes for D.C.’s youngest citizens.” The first session will focus on the subject of implicit bias and will be moderated by Dr. Walter S. Gilliam, the Director of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy and Associate Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale University Child Study Center.

Wednesday, September 27: Organizations are encouraged to have employees wear jeans to work and make a donation to Fight for Children while communicating the importance of early childhood education. There will be a special media event on this day and people who share pictures of themselves in jeans on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #Jeans4Children could win tickets to Fight Night.

Thursday, September 28th: A daylong conference for teachers and leaders on topics such as Quality Project-Based Learning in the Early Years, Children Are Citizens: Reflecting on a Year of Inquiry, Global Artifacts: Using Objects to Help Kids Consider Perspectives, Leading Their Own Learning: Early Elementary Explorations of Their Neighborhood, and Seeing With All Our Senses. The event is being held at the FHI 360 Conference Center.

Friday, September 29th: Volunteer at Eagle Academy PCS, a Fight for Children partner school. More information to come.

Additional details about these events can be found here and at the Fight for Children website.

The organization highlights the following information about the importance of high quality early childhood education. For low-income children lacking this type of schooling:

25% more likely to drop out of school

40% more likely to become a teenage parent

70% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime

It looks like a truly exciting week to help our youngest neighbors get off to a great start in life.

Last evening, during a quiet monthly meeting of the DC Public Charter School Board when attendance at the session barely reached a quorum of board members and IDEAL Academy PCS received its third citation of fiscal mismanagement since March 2016, the body voted to give St. Coletta PCS an admission preference for special education students.

Its an interesting development. St. Coletta, as described in the meeting’s supporting documentation, is the only charter in the nation’s capital to focus on serving only students with disabilities. The reputation of the facility is stellar. The school is in its eleventh year of operation educating 251 scholars ages three to twenty two at its permanent facility located in Ward 7. The supporting documentation states that “St. Coletta PCS is a specially designed program for students with severe disabilities, including those with intellectual disabilities and autism, who require over 25 hours of special education services per their individualized education plans (“IEP”) and the most restrictive learning environment.”

The issue the school has been facing is that, like all charters, admission is on a first-come basis and when more students want to attend than there are spots, a lottery is held. St. Coletta has found that parents have sought admission for their kids who do not have disabilities. To best explain this situation I will quote directly from the PCSB staff:

“Once enrolled, if St. Coletta PCS determines a student isn’t eligible for its program
because he or she requires a less restrictive learning environment, the school must
complete an extensive process to review and modify the student’s IEP before
finding the student a more suitable educational placement. By implementing the
proposed special education enrollment preference, St. Coletta PCS will ensure that
the students who will best benefit from its program, those with the highest levels of
disability, have the highest opportunity for enrollment. Without this preference, a
student who does not require any special education services or requires a less
restrictive environment would need to be accepted into the program and could
result in 1) students with higher levels of special education needs not getting into
the program and 2) students losing valuable instructional time as they are assessed
and placed out of St. Coletta PCS to a school that offers a general education program.”

I strongly agree that St. Coletta has a unique and extremely valuable mission that should be supported. But the preference was granted through the school filing a charter amendment. My question is whether this is the appropriate process for altering an admission policy.

For example, could KIPP DC PCS now use the same method to give a preference to low income children? What about another school that wants to teach only kids living in the neighborhood? Might a charter amendment be utilized to discriminate against those that a charter would rather not let in the door?

My inclination is that something as serious as an admissions preference should be addressed as a revision to the School Reform Act. In this way the language could be written as not to favor a particular charter but all schools in the sector. For example, in this instance, the legislation would state that “any charter whose mission is to serve special education students may elect to give an enrollment preference to children who would be best served with these services.”

Public school reform has been successful in D.C. due to the competition for students that choice has promulgated. Therefore, anything that diminishes the educational marketplace must rise to an extremely high level before it is implemented. This is why I contend that an action by the D.C. Council, while harder to obtain, is the more suitable path.

The St. Coletta admissions preference will take effect for the 2018-to-2019 school year lottery. The charter has said that it will employ a sibling preference if the child meets its enrollment criteria.

Like so many people my age I’m tired of seeing everyone on the street glued to their cell phones. But the amazing thing about this trend of staring into glass rectangles is that if you could see what individuals were looking at odds are no two would be viewing the same thing.

We all have different interests and are motivated by different experiences. This is the exactly the point U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been making on a “Rethinking Schools” tour she has been on for the last seven days in six states. In Wyoming, at the beginning of her visits, she highlighted this concept, as explained by the Washington Post’s David Von Drehle:

“Most students are starting a new school year this is all too familiar. Desks lined up in rows. Their teacher standing in front of the room, framed by a blackboard. They dive into a curriculum written for the ‘average’ student. They follow the same schedule, the same routine – just waiting to be saved by the bell. It’s a mundane malaise that dampens dreams, dims horizons and denies futures.”

In a beautifully written piece, Mr. Von Drehle describes Secretary DeVos’s time at Kansas City Academy, a six through twelfth grade private school with 76 students. This is not exactly the type of institution where you would expect to find Ms. DeVos. As the Post writer observes, the school’s “heavy emphasis on the arts, the environment and social justice makes it an attractive option for progressive families. School lunches are farm-to-table.”

Protesters joined Ms. DeVos for her visit. Supporters of the school were aghast that she stopped by. A student who recently graduated from City Academy said she was “scared of someone coming into the school who disagrees with just about everything they believe.” This same former pupil went on to indicate that bathrooms at the academy are “trans-friendly.”

Now I will allow Mr. Von Drehle to tell the rest of the story:

“But as she pinched out a clay pot in the ceramics room and whipped up a veggie burger in the culinary room, DeVos was a living reminder that people who disagree about some things don’t have to disagree on everything. DeVos agrees passionately with one of the founding concepts of Kansas City Academy and the other schools around the country that practice ‘Expeditionary Learning.’ That is: Not all students learn in the same way or thrive in the same settings. This realization has sparked innovation in schools over the past generation. But it does pose obvious challenges to traditional public schools that group students by geographical boundaries rather than individual needs. . .

DeVos finished her 90-minute visit by answering questions from students in government class, where she made a warm impression on students who had found her mean and forbidding on YouTube. [Tiger] Baker [a senior at Kansas City Academy] said that ‘she was personally nice, respectful – kind of a mom thing. I loved being able to talk to her personally.’ When asked by the secretary why she chose his school to visit, DeVos replied that she admired the school’s approach to nurturing individuality.”

If we are to finally close the academic achievement gap and bring children living in poverty up to the same scholarly level as affluent families we are going to have to drastically change the way we having been teaching our kids in the past. This is the point of Ms. DeVos’ trip to Kansas City Academy.

In a Washington Post editorial that appeared over the weekend, Thomas Toch and Phyllis Jordan, the leaders of the think tank FutureED, attempt to re-write the history of D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, the plan that provides private school scholarships to children living in poverty. We must not let them. From the piece:

“The theory behind the initiative is to give D.C.’s low-income families more and better educational opportunities by supplying them with tax dollars to send their children to private schools. Fine. But voucher enrollment in the nation’s capital dropped for four straight years, from 1,638 in the 2013-2014 school year to 1,154 in the 2016-2017 year. More striking, greater than half the new students offered vouchers last year didn’t use them.”

The decline in enrollment was a direct result of years of determined effort by the United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on behalf of President Obama to close the program. Former D.C. Councilmember Kevin Chavous set the record straight in the Post back in 2012:

“The drop in participants is a natural outgrowth of two unforgiving scheduling decisions. First, the Education Department prevented the program’s administrator from accepting applications after an arbitrary date of March 31 of this year, shutting out anyone who came forward after that cutoff. Then, scholarship lotteries for the 2012-13 school year weren’t allowed to take place until July, far later than many parents could wait to make decisions about where their kids would attend school in the fall. Nobody at the department can give straight answers as to why.

In practical terms, what this means is that only 319 new students were offered scholarships, despite demand for many more.

These roadblocks are part of a long history of the administration’s resolute opposition to the voucher program, from Education Secretary Arne Duncan rescinding 216 scholarships in 2009 to the department ignoring the positive results of a gold-standard study, conducted by its own Institute of Education Sciences, that found that D.C. voucher students graduate at a rate of 91 percent — more than 20 percentage points higher than those who sought a voucher but either didn’t get one or didn’t enroll in the program after being accepted. Because of the delaying tactics of the department, a credible — and federally mandated — new study of the program cannot be conducted unless the program enrolls hundreds of new students next year.”

The obstacles created by the Obama Administration were enough to have Joseph E. Robert, Jr. end his Washington Scholarship Fund’s administration of the OSP back in 2009. It was then run by the D.C. Youth and Investment Trust Corporation, a group that had no enthusiasm for the job. In 2015, OSP management was awarded by the Department of Education to Serving Our Children. SOC has the goal of doubling or tripling the number of scholars participating in the OSP.

Mr. Toch and Ms. Jordan state that the program costs $200 million. I don’t know where they get their information. The OSP takes up a minuscule part of the federal budget coming in at $15 million a year. As part of the three-sector approach equal amounts are awarded to the traditional and charter school sectors for a total of $45 million. You would really expect more from a think tank associated with Georgetown University.

The FutureED representatives also make a big deal about the percentage of students who elect to utilize the scholarships versus the number awarded. Let’s just keep in mind that parents fortunately have access to a plethora of school choice in Washington, D.C. In fact, it is estimated that 75 percent of pupils go to a school other than the one assigned by neighborhood. We truly have a high performing educational marketplace here in the nation’s capital.

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